d
the columns.

Helene went back to her room. It was still dark, and the gloom had
invaded her soul also. Why was it that she was suffering to-day more
than usual? Was it a presentiment which oppressed her heart? What was
going to happen?

V

Six o'clock had just struck. The grey light of morning broke into the
cell in which Helene walked up and down with a nervous step, casting
from time to time a sad glance out of the window; she felt that to-day
neither sleep nor calm would come to her. Olia, woken by the sound of
her footsteps, had come several times to her door; but Helene had always
sent her away, begging her not to be anxious about her.

There was nothing in her past with which she had to reproach herself.
She had given all that she had. Why then did the consciousness of having
acted rightly not bring her the peace for which she longed? Then,
catching herself murmuring, she began to pray, but the prayer did not
come from her heart. Her exhaustion caused her to feel giddy; she even
rejoiced in this, seeing in it a sign of the torpor for which she
craved. Passing into her inner room, she lay down on her bed, with her
eyes closed, but sleep did not come. Dawn broadened into day, and the
austere countenances of the icons seemed to be bent fixedly on poor
Helene as she lay, deprived of strength. She made a movement and her
hand touched the old newspapers in which the preserves sent by the
general's wife had been wrapped. Hardly knowing what she did, she
unfolded one of them, and glanced at it carelessly; the paper glided
with a light rustle behind her bed; a vague desire to know what was
going on in the world seized her; she took another sheet; her eye fell
on the not very edifying details of a divorce case; she turned the page
and found there, by a strange chance, a correspondent's letter from her
native town of which she had heard nothing for so long. She saw that the
date of this letter was that of the year in which she had left her
country.

Scarcely had she glanced through some lines than her blood turned to ice
in her veins and a chill pierced her heart. She uttered such a groan
that Olia awoke with a start. As though she could not trust her eyes,
poor Helene read the article a second time. Yes, they were there, those
cursed lines! a thing more horrible than murder. She had not yet taken
in the awfulness of it. A fit of frenzy seized her brain. She seized the
newspaper and brandished it at the sacred pi